Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Very Fast VOIP

With VoIP becoming a more popular choice for businesses globally, many consumers haven't yet made the choice to switch. This is mostly because they're happy with their current service and are either unaware of VoIP or don't know how it will benefit them. This article attempts to explain both sides of the issue and talks about how some of the disadvantages are being ironed out.

Advantages of VoIP
For retail consumers, the most obvious advantage of VoIP is the cost. It's simply less expensive to make calls to local numbers because the VoIP service ensures that your data travels over the Internet for as long as possible where it's free. This really becomes more apparent when you use VoIP for making International calls. The cost differential is astounding - overseas VoIP calls are orders of magnitude cheaper than those made by regular phone systems.

Businesses however, are really the ones who benefit from all of VoIP's advanced features even more than they benefit from the price reductions. This is one of the reasons why VoIP has seen major adoption in businesses throughout the globe. For example, SIP forking can be used to ring many phones at once, direct inbound dialing (DID) is available and advanced functionality such as ACD queues and business hours routing is easy to set up and configure.

And these benefits are only going to get better with time. As the system evolves, we're going to find a way to interconnect with other VoIP providers and break down the "islands" which we currently have. When that happens, voice calls will be almost entirely free. "VoIP peering" as it's called is still in its infancy, but history shows that such technological issues tend to get resolved fast.

Disadvantages of VoIP
For a home user, there are a few important drawbacks of VoIP as of now. The first is that it's entirely dependent on your Internet connection which in turn is linked to services such as your electricity. If that goes down, you phone line dies as well. With regular phones, the power comes from the telephone company providing a bit of redundancy in an emergency.

The second disadvantage is that there is no automatic 911 emergency facility. There are services such as E911 which customers have to opt in to but since it's not automatic, there are concerns that it could be a safety issue.

Businesses however don't usually need 911 services and they almost always have their own power systems to keep running., so these limitations don't apply to them.

And that's a broad overview of the advantages and disadvantages of VoIP.